A Scent of Memory
by Lady Letitia
Summary: Two losses haunt him especially: that of his godfather, slain in combat, and that of the double agent whose body was never found.
1. Default Chapter

**A Scent of Memory**

He found the parchment wedged into the corner of one of his old school trunks. Water-stained and stiff, it must have been there for years. He prised it out and unfolded it, but found that the ink spread out in a spidery wash. Out of that halo rose the ghost writing: _I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death_, the words of a ghost-boy who had died by growing up, recording the words of a ghost-man growing nightshade and corruption in some unmarked hole. Harry liked to think that there were brambles too, great forbidding thorny vines that grew brittle and heavy in winter, but white and fragrant flowers in spring. The flowers, he decided, would open only at night. Their pale luminescence would shine in the gloom and they would release the haunted sweet-rot smell of decomposing flesh. Moths would come, attracted by the little moon-flowers and brush the gray powder of their wings upon the vines as they struggled in the tiny jaws of bats, and the bats would glide off into the night, covered in pollen the color of old blood, looking for new moths and new vines.

In summer, the vines would be laden with berries, pendulous and black. They would swim with rainbows like oil-slicked pavements in the rain, but wizard children would see them and think only of soap bubbles and bath time. Their parents would slap their hands away in suspicion, but the children would always return and the berries would be sweet, but with a taste that made you sad... even though it turned out that they weren't poisonous after all.

"Harry? Are you ready yet?" Hermione peered around the door. "Are you alright?"

"Fine."

"Everyone else is all packed, but we need someone to help carry Parvati's trunk: it's too heavy."

"Oh... Alright." He closed his own trunk with a bang and followed Hermione out.

Parvati's trunk was, indeed, too heavy for one person, or even two. Moreover, it could not be lifted with the aid of magic. Magical perfumes, he was told, were highly volatile when exposed to even the mildest charms, hence Parvati had had the foresight to purchase a shielded trunk, but not the foresight to make it a liftable one (the trunk shielded its contents by repelling spells including the efficacious _leviosa_ family). Harry didn't understand how one girl could own so many... well... _things_, but he remembered the trunk from Christmas Holiday when he had been recruited to carry it. _This is the last time I'll be annoyed at Parvati for over-packing_, he thought. _This is the last time I'll carry this trunk down these stairs. This is the last time I'll bark my shin on the common room table on the way out_. Leaving Parvati and her trunk on the front steps, he returned to his dormitory. The room was nearly empty and he imagined that it should have felt small because of how he had grown since he had first inhabited it, or large because everyone had gone, but it neither expanded nor contracted in the funhouse mirror of his memory. Instead, it had begun to fade. Already, he felt it was unreal. These stones had absorbed nothing from the room's inhabitants; the walls would yield back no echo of his time here. And soon, very soon, a new group of first years would come and the room would be theirs. _This is the last time it will be my room_, thought Harry. He put his last book in his last trunk and took a last look around the dormitory. The summer light swam in through the aging windowpanes where the glass had run like rainwater on its inexorable course towards the earth. "Gravity," Hermione had said and then told him about the viscosity of glass, a liquid so slow that it fooled the human eye. He marveled that wizards had never found a way of halting its progress, but perhaps they had simply never thought of it. He went then, his trunk sweeping before him like a funeral barge gliding out to sea. In it lay the stained potions notes and the detritus of his childhood. The dormitory stood vacant, and outside the window, the ravens were calling.

  


On the train, he considered the possibilities of the lunch cart. The pasties were greasier than he remembered them, and left a slick feeling in his mouth that no amount of swallowing would dispel. Perhaps they had always been so and he had been too starved or happy to notice. He noticed now. What _was_ a pumpkin pasty, he wondered. It didn't seem to be purely pumpkin this time, but it didn't taste much like mutton or beef either. "Cat," Ron decided, "they're a greasy lot." Hermione sniffed and told him to stop being a baby. Crookshanks looked balefully at the pasties. "No, Sweetums," said Hermione, "you're on a diet."

_Greasy_, thought Harry. He knew what grease made him think of when it wasn't in pasties. Grease made him think of dungeons fuming with netherworldly smoke and belching sulfur fumes and frightened students, of late nights in the common room writing painful compositions on endless scrolls of paper. Now grease made him think of lunch carts brimming with snacks that dripped their murderous ichor onto innocent paper napkins, staining them translucent. Would it not be fitting, he wondered, to be digested in truth by those who had consumed you in spirit. Was there not some cosmic irony or even rightness in returning to churn the bellies of the same ungrateful children who had tormented and been tormented by you. _And we'd never know_, he thought. But, of course, he did know that it couldn't be so. _He_ must have been far away, or someone would have found him. Unless they had hidden him... but why would anyone take so futile an action? He imagined the trolley lady returning to her snack-making lair and pouring out her great cauldron where she had rendered the fat, spilling a tiny bundle of bones and dry, black hair upon the flagstoned floor. The bones would go for soup making, but the hair she might keep in a little sachet with lavender in it in the top drawer of her bureau, and for ever afterward, her slips and great, white girdles would smell musty and sour and she would wonder whether the lavender were starting to go bad.

Crookshanks, meanwhile, had tired of watching the inert pasties and was instead pressing himself against the window.

"It's the birds," said Ron. "I'll bet he wants to catch one."

"Mummy's kitty wouldn't do that, would hims?" cooed Hermione. "Besides," she continued, more practically, "they're ravens: They're much too large for him to kill."

Ron sniffed. "I'll bet he wouldn't mind a crack at them though."

The birds dipped and whorled in a great soot stain of a flock.

"I wonder what they're looking for," said Ron, and Hermione lectured at them.

"The Raven," she said, "is the largest of the corvidae, which are in turn the largest of the passeriformae or songbirds." Brilliant, but territorial, the raven mated for life. They were known as gods or messengers of gods in ancient times, which made them feared, and as nuisances to farmers in modern times, which got them shot.

The cadence of her voice soothed him as he stared out at the wheeling birds. He wondered when she'd begun speaking that way to the cat, as if it were a baby, like Aunt Petunia with Dudley maybe. It must be some sort of nesting instinct Ð like birds Ð just one of those things about girls that mystified him utterly. Horrifying to think of Hermione turning into Aunt Petunia, but then it was only a cat, so he supposed it wouldn't be so bad if it got as bloated as Dudley and as bad tempered. Maybe he almost didn't mind Dudley since he'd never be seeing him again, or he didn't imagine that he would be. Hermione was joining some sort of research project, likely with many other promising witches with their own cats with faces that looked as though they'd been sat upon. Ron had a job with Gringotts. Both of them were starting immediately. Harry had other plans.

They passed from the hills into broad, flat, golden-green places. Harry imagined the blast of a shotgun and the plummeting black form like an inky hailstone. What would the other one do, he wondered. Would it hurl itself at the farmer, eating out his eyes and clawing his face beyond recognition? Would it remain in the field, circling, until it too plummeted from exhaustion? What did it mean that they mated for life? Would it just stay by itself? Hermione would know, but she was busy explaining guns to Ron who did not understand.

He gazed out the window. The little squares of field were hypnotically peaceful, and he couldn't imagine anything dead there. Would the second bird even understand? Perhaps it would lift on its great, black wings (_Up to four feet in diameter_ said the Hermione in his brain.) and fly away over the hedgerows and forests and on over the mountains until, at last, it came to the rocky seashore where the land was rent and twisted by an ancient fury: the malignant sea itself. There in a cave, it would perch and imitate the voices of wailing women, and maybe, if a traveler came there, the sound of a crying baby that would lead him in turns and starts to the bluff edge where he would peer over and see nothing but the surf and sharp rocks like teeth that would come up to catch at him as the bluff gave way.

Harry had heard of seagulls eating the same way, picking up clams in their hard little shells and dropping them from a great height upon the rocks. Then diving, they would tear and pluck the soft insides and the shards would be washed round and round until they became soft at the edges, pretty to look at, and safe to the touch.

But the shell of a man is not like the shell of a clam. Dropped from a great height, a man is all soft insides; his shell melts away into the air with his last exhalation. It may hover for a moment in the mind of a witness, but soon he will be convinced that _this_ cannot be the creature that sneered and snapped at him. _This_ is too still, too devoid of spirit. Where did it go, Harry wondered. He'd never been to church when he'd lived on Privet Drive and he'd never asked Ron what wizards thought.

"The raven," said Hermione, "is an omnivore."

"Eats up little babies, does it?" asked Ron.

"Don't be disgusting. It's much more likely to eat carrion Ð that means things that are already dead."

"I know what 'carrion' is."

_We're like a lot of blackbirds ourselves_, thought Harry. It was the Hogwarts robes, he supposed. They made him think of wings. All sorts of wings.

_So useful to have him swooping around like an overgrown bat_.

But the man that had said that was long gone, a casualty of a war that had taken his childhood to win.

He was surprised he had graduated at all, but with the rather dull Philomela Plimpsoll teaching Potions, it hadn't been so difficult after all. He didn't think it had been anyway. The time after Voldemort's fall had passed in a white haze that lifted only gradually to reveal an end of the year feast and passing marks. It wasn't that he couldn't remember exactly, more that everything was pale and thin next to the rich colors of the graveyard, the black and brown and so much red. He'd been covered in it when they'd brought him back, slimed all over with clods of grave-dirt stuck on with blood and heavy sliding things. In the end, it had been a matter of flying. A man is not a bird and a wizard without his broomstick is just a man.

They had met for a final duel, just the two of them... the two of them and another circle of the Dark Lord's own. It was meant to be symbolic, he supposed, meeting in the same place where Voldemort had created his new body out of blood and bones and pain.

It hadn't been a duel. It had been a lesson, an evening's entertainment for _them_, Voldemort's scald crows. Hooded and robed, they loomed at him out of the darkness and cackled with Voldemort's sibilated _crucio_.

And so he'd blurted the only spell that came to him through the red haze, wingardium _leviosa_, and the Dark Lord's robes had filled with wind, like thousands of beating wings and he had soared up and up and up. And then the wind had failed and he had dropped like a stone through water, like rainwater seeking the earth.

He had lain on his back while the death eaters flapped away in confusion and the blood ran away in little rivulets, seeping into the ground, down and down into subterranean aquifers that drained somewhere far away into the sea.

The night had been cold and clear and he'd reflected that it was the first time in ages that he'd seen the stars. Their chill fire was comforting and distant, untouched by Dark Lords and blood and oozing, heavy things that clotted his robes and made his skin shudder and itch.

They'd cut his clothing off of him, had had to peel it in places like the shell of an egg, brittle and cracking, and the skin had been blistered underneath wherever the blood had soaked through. Harry scratched absently at his stomach. He could still feel the memories of the rash ghosting over his skin.

The shell of a man wasn't like the shell of an egg either. The shell of an egg protected physical things, but the shell of a man, once cracked, let slip a sea of ephemeral vapors and vulnerabilities best kept in cover of darkness. Ravens, he thought, had no shells, but kept their secrets covered in a cloak of feathers with a sheen like oil spills on water that coated the beaches in a black grime and killed the shore birds and had the Muggles cleaning for months what could have been fixed with a wand swish.

But at least the birds could be cleaned, he thought. Not like moths that, once touched, were unable to fly, wings like ruffling parchment ripped beyond repair by clumsy human hands.

He thought then of all the things that flap and creep at night, from white and furry moths to bats to owls to great black dogs with eyes like lamps. And he thought that it was not the first time that there had been no body. With Sirius, there had been no time, with Snape, no inclination, but somehow he felt that they should have at least _tried._ No funeral, certainly, with no body, but a service? A memorial? Something at least. But there had been nothing. _ Later_, he had told himself, _when we've won._ But what would have been the point? Two years, of nothingness and space where there had been at last something and he had lost the taste for public ceremony. The stars had beckoned to him from where he lay and he thought that they whispered like the curtain in the doorway of death, to which he had never been able to put a proper name. Hermione had looked for it in books, as though that or anything would make it better, but there was nothing. Even Luna hadn't known what to call it, even if she did, like Harry, see it for what it was. Not even a doorway, really, more of an arch with a ragged curtain where its door ought to be and Harry wondered why every true and powerful thing was shabby and tattered, as though clean edges made a thing weak. He would have felt stronger for cleaner edges, but he didn't suppose you could find the edge of a man any more than his shell. It was a thing ephemeral.

Ephemeral as fame, evanescent as reputation, but did physicality make a thing better? What survives a person, he had wondered. Would Sirius care that he was still wanted, when Sirius no longer cared at all. What mattered to the dead? He had asked, once, in the infirmary and Dumbledore had hemmed and hawed, but told him a sort of truth: _The cares of the dead are beyond ken and grasp. Only in living can memories last._ Harry had asked him what he meant by setting him riddles and Dumbledore had looked at him sadly and said that it was a poem and a very old one, but that it was no riddle and Harry heard an echo from his first year, _It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live, remember that_. And so, it was in the spirit of memory, that he was going now, in his first year of freedom, to dwell in a place of memories: He was going, by himself, to Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, the ancestral home of Sirius Black.


	2. 2

**Out of Order**

As he stepped through the door, the smell of grime and rot wafted over him. The house of Black had withstood the Order, resisting past the redoubled efforts of Mrs. Weasley, past the strengthening of their numbers, past the war. Even Voldemort had not fought as the house had fought, and now it sat smugly, like a great fungal growth upon the otherwise unblemished Muggle street. Harry tiptoed through the front hall. There was little here besides the portraits, and they slumped silently in their frames as though the torpor of the place had, at last, overcome even them. No one had been here in months and he stifled a cough as he kicked up great clouds of dust. It was the first time _he_ had been here since fifth year, the first time since Sirius... Dead moths, he thought, thousands of dead moths had left this blanket, making the house itself furred like a giant moth wing. It would take cleaning spells. Hundreds and hundreds of cleaning spells. Maybe he could ask Mrs. Weasley what she used...

Shutting up an ordinary house leaves a feeling of waiting, of expectation. Someone will lift these dustcovers, divesting the house of its sleeping mask. Someone will prowl through the quiet halls with the pride of new ownership on his face. The house is like a great breath waiting to be released with the opening of its front door and the breaking of its silence. But the house of Black waited for no one. After all, who was left to come home?

Perhaps the house had laughed to itself like a great toad on hearing of the death of its last true master. Harry imagined the voice of Phineas Nigellus echoing from every painting, crying out at the loss, unbelieving in its search. He would have started with his own portrait, but moved on and on, crying from every painted portal, _"Sirius"_. And, in the end, the echoes would have died away into silence and swirling dust.

The house would have smiled to itself, knowing that there were others, others from the great gnarling family tree that hung still in the drawing room. Harry pushed open the door and there it was. Floor to ceiling, the tapestry glimmered in the darkness, as though its golden threads contained their own muted light, running from the beginning of time through vegetal veins, branching and branching until it drained away in clumps and burns at the bottom of the cloth. The name of Black had gone with the only truly fit one of the lot and Harry traced the burn mark with his finger. Blotted from the family tree, cast from life, the blank was tiny and unconnected. No alliance, no issue. The end.

But perhaps the house would have accepted one of another name, provided that their blood was dark and pure and ran with all the malevolence of their race. Perhaps it had waited for Bellatrix or Narcissa to return. A second child of either would not have been needed in its father's house. A second son, though the lesser Malfoy or Lestrange, would have been all the more a Black. The name would have stayed with the house, and no one would have forgotten, though another name lived on there. Yes, he was sure it had waited in dark and drowsy hopes for its own kind to return. But there were no more.

The Malfoys were slippery like snakes, but even a snake can be caught and eaten up by the faster mongoose, and even a little snake cannot squeeze itself out of a box when there is no hole at all. He had not seen her, only read the news after the trial of how they had found her, her pale hair spread out like seaweed and her skin like the porcelain of the bath… And he had dreamed that night of the swirling scarlet flowers that had bloomed from her, one from each wrist, welling up like springs and growing through the water, to float upon the surface like lotus leaves. He had dreamed of her chest moving slightly with the lapping of the water as though in breath.

He had never dreamed of Bellatrix. He had never had the satisfaction. Where Narcissa was ice and coldness, Bellatrix was the night. She was the eclipse that covers everything in its darkness till even the memory of light fades from your mind. And she was the mind and memory itself, its beginning and its end. Bellatrix had never been a mother, she had only killed, and Harry had lain in wait for her in the dark after lying awake because of her for so many nights and she had seen him anyway, but still he had won.

She was very like Sirius with his taunting and his fatal look of surprise as he had fallen. Bellatrix too had taunted him with the memory of his _crucio_ that slid like an itch along her skin. But he was older and he had learned that pain, even the pain that wears and eats your soul, is not the same as bloodlust, and despair and cruelty are good for different spells. His spell had caught her across the chest, spraying outward in a fine mist and ending in a great gouge in her belly and she had birthed a litter of bloody snakes and he had slashed her again. When they found her, they said that it looked as though a great dog had taken her up in its teeth and rent and ripped her and worried at all her soft places. Harry did not believe that Bellatrix Lestrange had had anything approaching softness, but he had worn a look of surprise all the same and suggested that she might have failed the Dark Lord once too often and been punished for her failure. They had shaken their heads and lamented the excesses of the Enemy even against its own kind. It had been a year, nine months and seven days since Sirius' death. It had made him warm again. It had been good press.

It was after that that Voldemort had called him out for their final duel. And Harry hadn't even reacted when he had suggested that they were now exactly the same. The Dark Lord had expected some response, he thought, though what he would have said, he was unsure. There had been a difference between them still, but he couldn't have said that he – Harry – was unable to perform an unforgivable curse. Bellatrix, beginning and end, had taught him that, and so Harry had had nothing to counter them with and lashed out in desperation, and Voldemort had died not in a conflagration of green lightning, but in an ignominious fall, breaking his neck and the backbone of his power on the corner of a tombstone.

And that was all there was to it: no Blacks remained to darken the doorway of number 12, Grimmauld Place and no daughters of the Blacks remained to send second sons. Perhaps all of the old families _were_ as interrelated as Sirius had said, but nothing remained of the true house of Black.

It was still, nominally, the home of the Order, but it had become Harry's at Sirius' death. He had not thought to ask about a will, but Dumbledore had come to him in sixth year and told him and he could not give it up, even if it was a place that had only caused them pain. It was, at least, a link. He had told Dumbledore that the Order could continue to use it, but that was during the height of the war and they were seldom there now. The house needed a caretaker, and he had graduated and there was really no one else.

The dust motes drifted past the weaving branches of the tree and he followed them back to their shining source in the names of Dionysia and Wulfhere Black. From them, this whole tangle descended, diluting and diluting until it ended in the welter of cigarette burns and broken links. He thought of the litter at the base of a great tree and lifted his wand and Bellatrix burned away, her golden and shining name snuffed out.

  


The kitchen still held a hint of human habitation. Mrs. Weasley had managed to clean it properly before the war effort had started in earnest and it had not fallen back into the same coma and decay as the rest of the house, but Harry could not bear to stay there for long. Kreacher was gone, but Harry imagined that a faint miasma of loathing and pleasure leaked from behind the boiler cupboard door. He could not feel grateful to the house elf. Hermione told him that it had been a heroic death, that in the end, Kreacher had defended his home like any good house elf; that many of the Order, caught unawares, would have died if he had not sacrificed himself. Harry did not care. The creature had deserved a pointless, trivial death, falling backwards in surprise to end in the flick of a curtain and then nothing. His name even sounded like 'creature' or maybe 'sneak' or 'screech' or 'leach'. He imagined the very name leaching any remaining happiness from the house. Sniveling, crawling monster! If only Sirius hadn't underestimated him. If only he had been more cautious.

Harry leaned against the kitchen door, shaking. He could never forget it for long. _Why did you laugh, You Bastard? Why weren't you faster? Why did you leave me alone!_ With difficulty, he banished the look of surprise and the long and graceful twisting motion from his mind. At least Sirius had had that much. It had been a battle, with the clean glory of righteous anger. At least he knew that there was no body to find, no point in searching. He thought of other losses, mysterious and quiet. Some had been taken unawares from behind and never knew. Some had been tortured. Some were simply gone, without even the swaying of a curtain in a unidirectional wind. At least Sirius was missed with an aching poignancy that shaded some mornings with dark grief and a weight on his chest that made him want to sink down into the bed and never rise again. And he wondered again about hollow places, not in hearts, but in minds, where the memories faded away from lack of care and all that was left was a faint crawling feeling, like you got in your stomach before tests from nice teachers and class with nasty ones. And he wondered if things would have been different if they had just _trusted_ him once in a while. But he imagined that they would not.

He hadn't yelled that time. There was none of the hot and brilliant pain of Sirius, none of the denial, no need to scream or smash. He had not waited to be told.

_Professor Snape hasn't been to class in a month. _

_No._

_Well?_

_We're still looking._

But Dumbledore had looked older than even before and Harry had known they would find nothing, and Professor Plimpsoll had finished out the term and continued on the next year. It was only one more blot on that terrible time and he did not have the energy to wonder about it beyond the pain of Sirius. It had all been black news then, all aching and dreadful, though muted by bigger and more pressing pains. But Harry had found that some pains gnaw at the very root of you and slip in unnoticed, so that he felt a sort of discomfort about Snape that he never had about Sirius, a niggling and gnawing at the back of his mind that he should have remembered something or done something or… who knew?

He wandered back upstairs, through the front hall and up the staircase covered in carvings of snakes and the horned faces of men that leered at him from wooden riots of vegetation. He followed their winding progress up and up to Sirius' mother's room at the top of the house where Buckbeak had once been kept. He was back with Hagrid now, but the room still held a whiff of something untamed about it. Harry could imagine Sirius here, curry comb in hand, lank hair tangling about his wasted face, cleaning his fantastic steed and dreaming of better times, of escape, of flying free over London and away over the countryside. The wind would have streamed in his hair, and for a moment, he would have been the handsome, laughing boy that Harry had seen in photographs of his parents' school days. They could have ridden together. He could almost feel Sirius' strong arms wrapped around him, bracing him against the wind that smelled of summer fields and rain and far away places they had yet to visit. They would have visited them someday, he was sure, together. It should have been Sirius' face that swam anxiously in and out of focus in the infirmary and Sirius who had clung to him laughing and crying and told him that they had won at last. But instead, there had been only a long silence, and still he was branded a criminal. They had never found so much as a whisker of Peter Pettigrew, and the Ministry would not take his word for Sirius' innocence, and in any case, they had more important questions that that of a dead man's charges, just or unjust though they might be. And so, Sirius who had lived for liberty and died for nothing at all was still not free.

But he had been no saint. Harry remembered again the horrible scene from Snape's pensieve, and the smiling face in his memory took on a sneering cast, an evil joy more common to the face of a Malfoy... But then wasn't Draco Sirius' nephew? And Harry wondered about families and blood and Narcissa awash in her red sea.

As Harry slept that night, in a vast canopied bed with curtains embroidered with stars, he dreamed that he could see Sirius floating out among them, a black shape against the black velvet folds of the night and he stretched out his hand to Harry and Harry found that he was staring into a deep pool of water that reflected the stars and he leaned lower and lower until he passed without resistance through the surface of the water, and the figure held him in its clammy grasp and he saw that it was not Sirius at all, but Professor Snape, or it was something that had been Snape, but he had bloated after so long in the water and his impressive nose was mostly gone to the tiny fish that flickered about them as they sank through the gloom. His mouth opened and from it issued a thousand curling shadows and a sound like heartbroken birds over a battlefield of bodies. And still they sank and the corpse's hair swam around him in great wings of black and tangled with his arms and, pinioned, he drifted into the depths of the water where there was no more light.

He woke in waves of sweat-damp sheets, his skin wet and cold as though it had been lately submerged. The bed curtains were heavy and opaque, but pinpoints of moonlight shone through where they were embroidered with their flood of stars. He slipped from the womb-like enclosure, issuing out into the chilly room. The floor still retained some hint of daytime warmth, but a strange cold draft breathed against his bare skin. The nighttime murmurings of the house were all about him, as he passed into the hallway and down the stairs. The carved faces in the railing seemed to wink at him in the light from his wand, but when he bent close to look, they were still.

The curtains in the drawing room were open and moonlight streamed in, bright, like a warped daylight that lit but gave no heat, and Harry had a feeling of _presence_. He swung about, but there was no one there.

Was he imagining things? He was on the point of returning to bed when he noticed the tapestry. The intricate gold filaments of the family tree glowed where the moonlight struck them, but not only the tapestry that he had seen in daylight. _This_ family tree extended even to the holes in the tapestry. He knelt. Over the burned places in the fabric, shining ghosts of names hovered. _Andromeda Black_ was joined by _Ted Tonks_, and below them, _Nymphadora Tonks_ sparkled over a blank spot. He touched the name and it rippled with a chiming sound. Mystified, he turned to the other names. _Andromeda_ let out another chime, but Narcissa remained static and dulled, while _Bellatrix_ shrank away from his touch. _Draco Malfoy_ was another chime, this one a little deeper. _Sirius Black_. His stomach gave a terrible wrench; even now, he couldn't face the name. The family tree seemed to reflect his pain, painting that name a darker, redder gold than the others. It pulsed angrily under his fingers and the sound, when it came, was like the tolling of a far off church bell, ringing out over a funeral. He jerked his hand away, and the sound dwindled to a dull shiver at the edge of his hearing, but the ripples continued to move outwards, each node of the family tree brightening slightly as a wave passed it. Downstairs, the portrait of Sirius' mother screamed.

Harry sprang to his feet. There must be an intruder in the house after all! Soon, all of the portraits were shrieking, and he dashed towards the front hall, wand out and ready... But there was no one there. He pushed open a door, and then another and another, but the floor seemed to be deserted. The paintings gradually quieted, but Harry couldn't stifle the feeling that there had indeed been someone there. He knew he had felt it, as though someone were watching, lurking, and the faint snap in the wake of an apparating wizard would have been lost in the cacophony. He prowled about the house until the light in the drawing room changed from milky pale to bright silver to the warm golden glow of morning before finally returning to bed.

This time, he slept without dreaming and awoke, bleary and disoriented to the stuffy warmth of the afternoon. Hedwig was drowsing in her cage, but she grudgingly accepted his letter to Dumbledore and took off in a flurry of irritation. Harry went out.

  


He apparated into Diagon Alley in front of Gringotts. The building was as unchanging as the goblins that ran it, and Harry felt calmer faced with its mammoth and enduring bulk. He wandered about, window-shopping and reminiscing. _Here_ was where he had bought his first robes. (The memory of a sneering eleven year-old Draco Malfoy made him hurry on.) _There_ was where Ron had finally asked Hermione out over ice cream at the beginning of seventh year, but Harry had no stomach for sweets today. _Here_, they had met the irrepressible Gilderoy Lockhart and bought a great many dull textbooks. He wondered whether there was anything more interesting in the depths of the bookstore, but passed on without buying. _There_, Hermione had gotten Crookshanks. Magical Menagerie had a sale on birds, he noticed, but Eeylops Owl Emporium was clearly superior, and anyway he had an owl already. He thought fondly of his first site of Hedwig. He had been buying a wand... _Here_ in fact. He pushed open the door to Ollivander's and the scent of the place surrounded him. The store smelled of exotic woods and prosaic polishes. Mr. Ollivander fixed him with a beady eye.

"Mr. Potter. It has been some time."

He nodded absently.

"And you have done great things. Just as I knew you would."

"I suppose."

"And what do you plan to do now that you have defeated He Who Must Not Be Named?"

Harry shrugged. "I haven't any plans just yet."

"Oh. I see." His expression turned from blank to cunning and back to blank all in a moment. "And how may I help you today? Not a new wand, surely?"

"No..." He didn't know himself, but 'window shopping' didn't' seem a sufficient excuse.

"Some polish, perhaps?"

"Yes. Thanks. Polish." He paid and pocketed it.

"I shall be watching your future career with interest, Mr. Potter."

Harry imagined that Mr. Ollivander would have a boring time of it. The career of Harry Potter, vanquisher of dark lords, was over. Now he was just the boy who had to go on living.


End file.
